vROPS – Enabling Automation for Delete Snapshot Action

In this next post I will explain how to enable some actions for “Automation” which are not available officially for automation in the policy….

While I like to fly by the seat of my pants and don’t like to play by the rules.. I can’t stress enough that this is not supported by VMware, they didn’t show me how to do this and you perform the steps at your own risk.

Now that I have the ass cover out of the way… let’s get too the juicy bits!!

This was done on vRops 7.5….

Start off by creating a custom Recommendation and attaching the action “Delete Unused Snapshots for VM Express” to it.

Then I will just clone the alert definition “Virtual machine is running on snapshots for more than 2 days” and link my new recommendation to it…

Now we go an browse the policy to enable automation…

oh snap it’s “Not Applicable” DAM YOU vROPS GODS!!! oh well down the GSS not supported route once again…

SCP to each vROPS node and make a backup of describe.xml located in /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound/PythonRemediationVcenterAdapter3/conf and make the following modifications to the original one… in the XML search for the node below

Save the file and nagivate to Administration –> Support –> Redescribe and click the button, wait for it to finish and then go back into the policy and enable automation.

Jackpot!! More automation that the man didn’t wantz you to have!!

And yes I can confirm the automation works… but you can check for your self when an alert fires navigate to Administration –> History –> Recent Tasks and check out the automation goodness…

Now jokes aside be sure you understand what you are doing as it says it’s an express snapshot delete so it might cleanup other snapshots you don’t want it to in the process…. it all depends on your need / setup.